From Here - Hardcover

Mufleh, Luma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593354451 ISBN 13: 9780593354452

Verlag: Nancy Paulsen Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

In her coming-of-age memoir, refugee advocate Luma Mufleh writes of her tumultuous journey to reconcile her identity as a gay Muslim woman and a proud Arab-turned-American refugee.

With no word for “gay” in Arabic, Luma may not have known what to call the feelings she had growing up in Jordan during the 1980s, but she knew well enough to keep them secret. It was clear that not only would her family have trouble accepting her, but trapped in a conservative religious society, she could’ve also been killed if anyone discovered her sexuality. Luma spent her teenage years increasingly desperate to find a way out, and finally found one when she was accepted into college in the United States. Once there, Luma begins the ago­nizing process of applying for political asylum, which ensures her safety—but causes her family to break ties with her.

Becoming a refugee in America is a rude awakening, and Luma must rely on the grace of friends and strangers alike as she builds a new life and finally embraces her full self. Slowly, she’s able to forge a new path forward with both her biological and chosen families, eventually founding Fugees Family, a nonprofit dedicated to the education and support of refu­gee children in the United States.

As hopeful as it is heartrending, From Here is a coming-of-age memoir about one young woman’s search for belonging and the many meanings of home for those who must leave theirs.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Luma Mufleh is the founder of Fugees Family, with schools now in Georgia and Ohio and an expanding footprint, bringing educational equity to refugee resettlement communities across America. Her TED Talk on educational justice for refugee families was viewed more than 1.8 million times.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue
A Question

“Is your dad dead?”

Leila doesn’t make eye contact. Her five-year-old legs stretch out over mine. We’re still in pajamas, our labneh-smeared plates stacked by the sink. The kitchen floor beneath us is cold after a long winter. Her question is a gut-punch.

“No.” I clear my throat and turn her face to mine. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Because we only talk to Taytay and Namo and Khalo,” she says, meaning her grandmother, aunt, and uncles.

“We just don’t talk to each other,” I offer, already knowing it won’t be enough.

“Why?”

Emily had warned me this might happen. Leila had been asking questions, she said, maybe I should be ready for them. But how do you tell your daughter that some families, in fact, disown their daughters? That mine did it twice? That you can still love a country even when it does not love you back?

If there are answers to these questions, I don’t know them. So I go with something simple. “Because he doesn’t understand me.” I work my fingers through her hair, tangled from the kind of deep sleep I must have had once. “He doesn’t like that I married Mommy.”

“Why doesn’t he like Mommy? Everyone loves Mommy.” Leila’s eyes narrow like she’s ready for a fight. I’ve said the wrong thing.

“In Jordan, two women can’t get married.”

“What would happen to you?”
“I’d probably be killed.”

“But you said Jordan is beautiful!”

“It is beautiful, Leiloushti.”

Leila goes quiet. Next to us, my phone is dark. I imagine my mother in Amman, waiting by her own phone, halos of cigarette smoke around her sunny-brown hair. It’s been half a dozen years since she and my father moved from the palatial estate of my childhood and into an apartment nearby, more appropriate for the two of them and their small staff. I will likely never see the room that she waits in for our calls, but I can picture her fussed-over houseplants, the throbbing reds and blues of the Persian rug at her feet.

I think about what Leila knows: about the time my cousin Omar and I drank the “magic potions” we made from our uncle’s chemistry set, how my grandmother rushed us to the hospital so quickly she forgot to put on her hijab. I’ve told her about sneaking the car out when I was eight years old and crashing it into a tree. I’ve explained all the Muslim holidays to her, the best pastries for Eid, what it’s like to float in the Dead Sea. She’s learned how to cook using her nose. She’s heard about the soccer games in the streets, about the two tortoises we used for goalposts and how they would wander off midgame. She knows about the pistachio rolled ice cream that I ate with my cousins during Amman’s endless summers.

I think about what Leila doesn’t know: The suicide attempts. The policeman pointing a gun at the back of my head. My first sexual experience, a terrible secret with a much older woman. The honor killings. The asylum hearings and weeks spent alone and shivering on a Greyhound bus. Emily’s and my wedding, when not a single member of my family showed up. All the years I would call home, only to hear the click of the dial tone. The parts of my story I’ve left out to protect my daughter’s innocence, the version of the world I would like her to live in.

I take a deep breath.

“Do you want to talk to Jiddo?”

Leila’s body stiffens against mine. She calls my bluff. She doesn’t even hesitate. “Yes!” she says with the enviable confidence of a child. I don’t want to stand in the way of her getting to know her grandfather. I want her to believe that all people are good. I want to believe the same thing.

---

Technically, the last time I spoke to my father was seven years before that morning on the kitchen floor. Before Leila, before the new house and school in Columbus. In many ways my father and I were strangers to each other even then, still navigating a tense reconciliation after our first seven years of silence.

I asked Emily to marry me in Illinois, conspiring with her family to surprise her. Her sister scattered Ring Pops—I had always threatened to propose with one—like rose petals along the sidewalk that led to Emily’s favorite breakfast joint. It was a Midwestern April, bright and wet. The ground soaked through the knee of my pants; the sun burned my eyes as I looked up at her.

“Did you say yes?” I asked, practically panting, my face pressed against Emily’s shoulder.

“Did you ask anything?” she teased. I didn’t know if I had.

The restaurant was full of relatives and friends—when Emily saw them, she put her hands over her heart, her curls swung with wild laughter. We collected hugs and clinked glasses and reveled in the hours made, it seemed, just for us. Even her divorced parents set aside old resentments for the morning. Looking at them, I wondered how I could be so good at mending other people’s families, but never mine. Amid so much joy, that familiar loneliness found me; all I could see were empty chairs where my own family should have been.

Later, in the quiet of her mother’s guest bedroom, Emily wanted to know if I had told my parents about our engagement yet. “You always think worst-case scenario,” she said. I didn’t know how to tell her that the scenarios I thought about were so much worse now that her feelings were at stake.

In the email to my parents the next day, I wrote, I know this is hard for you to hear, because this is not what you expected for your daughter. But I have never been happier, and I hope I can have your blessings.

Even though I also wrote, I haven’t told anyone else in the family—I want to share it with you first, it was my brother who called a few days later, after Emily and I had returned home to Atlanta.

“How could you do this?” he asked, and I wondered which part he thought was more audacious: that I had fallen in love or that I expected anybody to be happy for me. “Couldn’t you wait until they died?”

“Until they died? Seriously, Ali? That’s the best you’ve got?” I raged at him. I smacked the steering wheel of my parked car, baking in the Georgia sun.

“And she’s Jewish!”

“Jews and Muslims have a lot in common. We don’t eat pig—”

“This is not funny.”

“It is a little funny,” I taunted.

“Why are you doing this?”

“The same reason you did it. We’re in love. We’re going to have kids.”

“Kids? Are you crazy? You can’t have kids.”

“Why? Because she’s a woman? Or because she’s Jewish?”

“Just don’t expect them to call you,” he warned.

“Kul kharah,” I told him. Eat shit.

We hung up on each other.

Months later, in a hotel room in California, where Emily and I were looking at wedding venues, my mother’s number appeared on my cell phone.

“Answer it!” Emily urged, a wellspring of hope. She perched on the edge of the bed during the call, smiling and searching my eyes as if they might translate Arabic into something she could understand.

“Well! What did she say?”

“She said that it’s hot there.”

My mother...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Nancy Paulsen Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593354451
• ISBN 13: 9780593354452
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar